Designer Sweet | Papabubble x Cappellini

Courtesy of Tobias Wong and Josee LepageCappellini’s SoHo showroom has become a pop-up holiday shop, where furniture and candy seem made for each other.

The cherry-red interior of the Cappellini flagship store in SoHo has always reminded me of candy — it’s the color of Red Vines, Swedish Fish, Atomic Fireballs, Hot Tamales, Abracabubbles, Cinnamon Discs, Red Hots and candy apples. So it seems fitting that from now until Jan. 3, the Italian furnishings shop will also be in the sweets business. “The Candy Shoppe: Papabubble x Cappellini” is this year’s holiday installation by the curators Tobias Wong and Josee Lepage, who asked the artisanal candy makers Papabubble to create what they call a “shoppe-in-shop” just inside Cappellini’s front doors. At an opening party last weekend, filled with fashionably dressed tots and their design-loving parents, limited-edition confections were stored in jars and honey pots on Cappellini’s Passepartout shelves and piled high in the polished acrylic drawers of a staircase-like cabinet by Shrio Kuramata.

The candies are made by Papabubble’s co-owners, Fiona Ryan and Chris Grassi, at their Broome Street workshop, where a mixture of sugar, water, glucose and flavor is stretched and sculptured by hand on heated tables. Ryan and Grassi took literal inspiration from Cappellini, creating candies based on Marcel Wanders and Marc Newson chairs in its collection, and an edition of 10 lollipops depicting Wanders’s face. But they’ve also riffed on the company in more conceptual ways. The Cappellini red pops up over and over, and the signature sweet for the event is a candy-cane X, meant to represent the “multiplier” effect of this collaborative project.

In keeping with the old-world feel of the sugar pastilles, Wong and Lepage commissioned packaging of kraft paper and butcher’s twine, and a logo that resembles an elongated peppermint stick. “It’s all meant to put Cappellini in a totally different context,” Grassi says. “We like the idea that you’ll walk in and say, ‘I’m in a furniture store, but what can I eat here?’”

Davies and StarrThe artisanal candy maker Papabubble created special sweets like this one for its collaboration with the furniture company Cappellini.